looking at pictures

It’s All a Blur

Russian photographer Alexei Vassiliev‘s hazy subjects hover just beyond the viewer’s reach, disappearing in a blur caused by a sudden movement or an out-of-focus lens. A woman in a turquoise coat stands in a metro station, bobbed brown hair and a tired swanlike sway to her neck. Her gaze beams directly at the camera, but her eyes are indistinct, hollow gray fields that make her glance all the more intriguing and intense.

Vassiliev who now lives and works in Paris describes it this way: “The more blurred the subjects of these portraits, the more they looked as if they were on the verge of dissolving, fading away, or disappearing — that is when their presence really asserted itself. ”